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So, here we are at the end of NaNoWriMo 2017. I have won, for the 7th time in 10 years of doing NaNo. But it wasn’t easy this year. (I look back, and I think the only times it was easy were 2008-2010.) And… as you may have guessed from the last two posts, I did not finish There Be Dragons. But I now have a great deal more than I did to begin with, so it’s a success nonetheless.

So, here we are. I managed to win not quite by the skin of my teeth (that would be winning tomorrow, it being the last day for it).

This last chapter has been fighting me a fair bit, so I was worried (despite my excellent word count two days ago) that I wouldn’t be able to make it, but here we are! Thanks go out to Vathara and the other members of the NL NaNo group, for their support and encouragement.

So, I’m ending today with a word count of 50,157 words. But I’ll still be writing tomorrow (I want that “updated word count for 30 days” badge!), and likely for the next month, on and off, as I try to finish the first draft of There Be Dragons. (Because no matter how much I wanted to, I didn’t manage to get even close to finishing. I’d say I’m about half to 5/9 done.)

Thanks for following me on this epic journey of my tenth year of doing NaNo!

So, I missed last week’s post. Apologies for that – I was not having the best few days when it was due, and then I decided to wait until either I’d caught up with the expected total word count, or the 28th, whichever came first.

Last post, I’d just finished Chp. 3 and Interlude #1. In the meantime, I’ve had some very good writing days (5 days over 3,334, including the 16th; 8 days over 1,667, including the 16th and today), and some not-so-good ones (4 days under 1,100).

At the moment, I’ve finished Chps. 4 and 5, and I’m partway through Interlude #2 – and discovering something that I hadn’t known an hour ago that adds an extra dimension to the situation the protagonists are in. (Well, the protagonists and the rest of the Interstellar Police officers on Mephamtere….)

Yesterday I managed to match (and exceed) the expected total word count for the day, for the first time since Nov. 2nd. (Almost the whole month. Ow.) Today I’ve already managed to surpass the expected total word count for the day. 🙂 So there’s no doubt that I’m going to win… although I seriously doubt that There Be Dragons will be finished by the 30th. (Not with this new plot twist added into things.) So I’m likely to continue writing it into December, with S&R re-writes pushed back to January and February.

21st’s word count: 30,177. Where I should have been by then: 35,000.

Today’s (so far) word count: 45,471. Where I should be at midnight: 45,000.

I’m totally winning this. 🙂

Next post: My winning! (And maybe end of NaNo, if I don’t get to 50K before Thursday.)

Apologies for the lateness of this – I originally intended to get it out the evening/night of Nov. 14th, but I had to get up early for an appointment yesterday morning, and completely forgot.

So, where were we….

Right, starting Chp. 3.

*headdesks*

That… didn’t go so well to start off with. Oh, I started strongly (1,774 words on the 8th)… but then the interaction between my protagonists began, and things got bogged down. 4 days worth of less than 150 words/day bogged down.

So on Monday I scrapped everything I’d written of Chp. 3 into the “counts for words but not as part of my story” file, and re-started the chapter. And that dealt with that block! I’ve been going strong since then.

In other news, I’m planning to apply to be co-ML for the region of Newfoundland (and Labrador?) next year. I’ve been organizing all the St. John’s in-person write-ins this year (our current only ML lives elsewhere and doesn’t have a car, so she can’t really do that), and I figure it might be interesting.

Since I’ve written barely any words so far today (I do my best work at night), I figured I’d give you the word count as it was on the 14th. (I caught up by another 1K+ words yesterday, and don’t yet have today’s.)

14th’s Word Count: 15,119 words. Where I should be (then): 23,333 words. And I’m back to more than the daily word count (yesterday I got 2,759 words), so I should manage to get back on track soon.

(No, Bunnies, that was not an invocation to Murphy, and if you take it that way, I may have to do something to your next shipment of Plot Bunny Feed(tm).)

Addendum (23:02 NST): Okay, finished the writing for today, which was a long session. So. Today’s Word Count: 22,158. Where I should be: 26,667. I’m a lot closer now! (Total of 4,299 words written today, Chp. 3 and just-conceived-of-two-hours-before-writing-this Interlude done!)

So, it’s coming up to midnight on November 7th, the end of Week 1 of NaNoWriMo 2017. And how have I been doing, you might ask?

*sighs*

Yeah, I’m behind. It seems to happen every year in Week 1 – if it’s not that I’m sick, it’s that the Bunnies are kicking up a fuss, or I’m blocked. This year, it was sort of all of that. Had a minor cold last week (naturally from Wednesday onwards). Got stuck in Chp. 2 of TBD. *sighs* And had two days when I got less than 100 words written.

Good news on the horizon, though! Chp. 2 has been finished (at least as much as I can get at the moment; there are a few scenes where I have comments in square brackets about what’s to go there later), and I’m on to Chp. 3, where the action really starts to pick up.

And my villains have become even more villainous. I thought they were kind of generic bad guys at first, nasty to animals (or those they think are animals), not caring about the environment, etc. Turns out that they’re worse than that. My human protagonist just got dumped in a place where they’ve dumped a lot of other inconvenient people. And, you know, there’s a direcat pack around that kind of appreciates the free meals….

Today’s Word Count: 8,869 words. Where I should be: 11,667 words. But I’ve managed more than the recommended daily word count the four (out of seven) days that I’ve managed to hit over 250 words, so at least I should be able to catch up.

Wow. I’ve really been neglecting this blog over the last year and a half or so. Whoof. Didn’t even do anything with 2016’s NaNoWriMo (which I won, by the way) here. *shakes head at self* Okay, I’ve got to do better.

Anyway, as the title says, NaNoWriMo is almost here. (In fact, it will be here in 2 hours from when I post this.) So, posting time! (And this time I will try to keep the updates going.)

This is my tenth year doing NaNoWriMo (yay!), and while I’ve won 6 out the last 9 years, the only years when I actually finished the novel I started working on were the first two (2008: Search and Rescue, and 2009: A Fox’s Fight). So that’s my goal for this year – not only win, but actually finish the novel.

As usual, my tracking page is up at tag’s Library: NaNoWriMo 2017. This year I’ve also added a “Word War” widget so you can follow my best friend’s progress along with mine. 🙂 Click to read summary

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So, it’s been a while. Since early May, in fact. Sorry about that, and hi, everyone! I hope life has been treating you as well as it’s been treating me.

This is going to be a fairly long post, which a number of different sections: about my new apartment, about Imber, about Camp NaNoWriMo for July 2015, and about exercising and how I’m doing with that. And pictures are included! (Luckily, I figured out how to do them as a gallery.) So I’m definitely putting it behind a “more” tag, and as you can see, I’ve added internal links to each of the sections to make it easier if you only want to read one or two of them at a time, and not have to go all the way through everything else….

So. It seems this was not a good month for writing for me. My concentration has been shot most of the month, and I’ve written less than 4,000 words of There Be Dragons. Definitely not enough to win, even when I lowered my word count goal to 20K words.

On the other hand, I always count any writing done during NaNo or Camp NaNo as at least a partial success. As is often mentioned at the end of the month, at least there’s however many words more written than you had at the start of the month!

Not sure exactly what I’m going to do with There Be Dragons at the moment; I suspect that at the very least, I’m going to let it sleep for a few weeks while I try to get rid of the brain fog I’ve been in most of the month. With any luck, May will be better – I’ll likely be at least somewhat more active, for one thing, now that the weather is finally starting to warm up here. (Not that you’d know it from the drizzle and wind today, but….)

If nothing else, I suspect I’ll get back to work on TBD for July’s CampNaNo. 🙂

Not much, I’m afraid. Started out okay, though not great, on the first… and then didn’t write, and didn’t write. *sighs at self* As of yesterday, I only had about 1,028 words written. That’s not much for being a third of the way through the month!

Today, I took a different tack. I went back to my NaNoWriMo roots, and went to a coffee shop. I figured the change in scenery would help get things moving. (And I also reduced my word count goal to 35K words for the month, but if I can keep at the rate I’ve started going today, I’ll be able to bring it back up to 50K….)

It’s just after 19:30 hrs here, and I’ve added another 2,010 words. And I’ve just started a new scene, with so much fun to play with…. So I’m doing well now, and came up with a good way to break the block I was running into.

Which leads me to a piece of advice, for any others doing Camp NaNo who are reading this. If you’re not getting anywhere with your story, or you keep running into roadblocks… try changing the scenery around you. Sometimes we need to get away from the everyday.

Also, you may notice that my theme has changed. Yeah, I was running into a few problems with the old theme, so moved it around. The original menu items are now under the “Main Pages” menu, and I’ve added more menus for other things that I figured people might be interested in. 🙂

So, April starts tomorrow. And with April comes many things. (The worst being Autism $peaks’s “Light It Up Blue” campaign. See my autism blog and the links for details.) Among those many things is Camp NaNoWriMo. (Obvious, from the title of the post, I know.)

This year, I’m not going to work on the general fiction autism story I’ve done for the last two years; I think it needs to sit for a few years. Instead, I’m going to work on the science fiction original version of my 2014 NaNo story Here Be Dragons. This version is now called There Be Dragons; it got too confusing otherwise.

So, non-Pernese dragons on a world that’s barely been explored by humanity, whose method of communication (which, yes, is primarily telepathy) drives approximately 99% of humans insane, and an undercover police agent investigating a black market in archaeological treasures found only on this world. Fun!

As usual, I’m aiming for the traditional 50,000 words, and planning to get more. Wish me luck, as I’m wishing luck to all the rest of you who are doing April Camp with me!

So, we come to end of NaNoWriMo 2014. I stand in the winner’s circle, proud, despite the adversity I encountered this month (for more info, read the post about my winning and last night’s post). And I have successfully managed to reach my altered goal of 60K words; in fact, my final word count is 61,232 words.

And boy, are the Plot Bunnies ever happy. They’ve been crazy all day – I think someone fed them caffeine adulterated with pounds of sugar. They’ve been hopping all over the place, particularly toward my other Sekirei fics and the SF Original Fic version of Here Be Dragons. *sighs*

Anyway, this month has been a good run, and I’m glad I did it. Here’s to all of us NaNoers, whether we got 50K or 5K – we did it! There are now more stories out there than there were at the beginning of the month. So “Yay Us!”

First of all, I apologize for missing last week’s weekly report. Unfortunately, due to a new dosage of medication, I spent most of last week (including Saturday) lightheaded and unable to concentrate. As a result, my productivity also went way down in terms of my writing.

I have recovered, however, but it’s likely that I’m not going to make the 75K goal. So I’m now trying for getting over 60K as of tomorrow night. (*gasp* Yes, NaNoWriMo 2014 ends tomorrow.) I’ve already won, now it’s just continuing to write as much as I can while I have the excuse of NaNo.

My current word count is 57,077 words; it might go up before midnight tonight, it might not. (Depends on how long it takes to read Vathara’s latest update, and post this.) Either way, I only have to get 3K words tomorrow in order to make that 60K goal, so it’s more than doable.

It’s been a wild ride this month, and thank you to all of those who have followed my progress and cheered me on. There will be one last post just before the end, tomorrow evening, which will also give you my final word count.

‘Later, all!

😉 tag

[Edit 23:50 hrs.: My final word count for the day is now: 57,270 words. Go me!]

So, a day later than originally intended (hellish headache yesterday interfered with getting much more than the 1,667 word daily count), but I have now won NaNoWriMo 2014, complete with pretty purple validated word count bar!

So. Word count, as of a few minutes ago, is now 50,429. Let’s march onward to 75K! (And maybe even 100K, if I can make it….)

So, I ended up in the Week Two Doldrums last Sunday, and it lasted until Wednesday (inclusive), which is why there hasn’t been a post in between last Saturday and today celebrating either Milestone #3 (40K words) or Winning (50K words), the latter of which I was originally headed for yesterday, before the W2D hit.

I managed to get a very few words written Sunday (less than 100), a few more Monday and Tuesday (between 100 & 200 each day), then just over 900 Wednesday. Since then, I’ve achieved at least 1,667 words, but not necessarily that much more.

As I’m writing this, I’m at just over 36K. I’m going to try to get at least 1K more before midnight, and then I should be able to reach 40K tomorrow, and 50K by Wednesday. So, that’s the plan.

In terms of this week’s Write-In, it was fun! There were no frogs there, but our missing ML “OneWriterWriting” managed to drag himself out, and we had the Usual Suspects. (Yes, if any of you guys happen to be reading this, you have now been dubbed the “Usual Suspects”.) And we discovered that a common thread in our stories involves a prison break of some sort, whether actual or metaphorical, and whether taking place in the novel or in the past and referred to in the novel. (In my case, it was an escape from experimental human testing that took place before the novel but has been directly referred to.) *grins*

At any rate, I definitely expect to have reached 50K before next week’s report. Yay me! Let’s just hope I can finish the story in the remaining 15 days left to the month….

And yes, I am including the weather in this weekly report, because it’s been weird all day. The sun’s been shining – well, it was until we were well into the meetup, stopped sometime between 15:00 and 16:00 hrs, I think – but the sky has been stormy. While I was walking from the Elaine Dobbin Centre (I have Social Club there on Saturdays… kind of meh, but I’m hoping it will perk up a bit as we start to have outings next week) to the MUN University Centre where we were having the meet-up, the sun was shining brightly as rain was hitting me hard enough to sound almost like hail or heavy snow. (Which it wasn’t, thank goodness.) Even saw a rainbow!

The meetup was fun, and I got to see several familiar faces, and meet someone new. Chatting happened about word count, Disney movies, “How to Train Your Dragon 2” (it was highly recommended by those who have seen it), battle scenes, character names, unusual aspects to characters, etc. Lots of stuff. (Oh, and frogs. There was a fair bit of discussion about frogs. ;))

Also found out about a neat little Asian store that’s right around the corner from The Loft in the MUN University Centre – have now had my first taste of mochi! They also sell pocky (marked up, admittedly), and canned coffee. And all sorts of Asian (not just Japanese) treats, and spices, and just general ingredients. I like! 🙂

Now, on to talking about my writing….

Ended up skipping around a bit in the story today, because the scene I was working on (linearly speaking) wasn’t gelling too well (partly because of the persistent headache). So I’ve done some work on the next scene, and a scene that’s another chapter away. *wry grin* Actually, as some of the themes in those scenes are connected (secrets and revealing them), it turns out to be working reasonably well for the moment.

Also had headache today, so didn’t make my usual 3.3K+. I did make 1.9K words, though, which brought me up to 27.4K words in total. Yay me!

And where I’ve stopped in the scenes is good as well – explosions coming tomorrow! 🙂 (Well, not literal ones. I don’t think. Heh.)

It is now the third day of NaNoWriMo 2014, about 23:25 hrs. here in Newfoundland (and parts of Labrador), and today, I passed the first major NaNo milestone for 2014 – I reached 10K words.

In fact, I’ve finished today with a word count total of 11,896 words out of 50,000 – which is over the word count goal for Day 7! (Which, BTW, is 11,667 words, in case you were curious.) And given that my personal goal has been to reach double the day’s word count goal… well, I’d have to say I’m off to a great start. (Today’s word count goal was 5,000 words. I reached 10K in the middle of this afternoon.)

So, *thumbs up* for me, and for all my fellow NaNoWriMos, who dare brave the cold November to write our stories! (Actually, not that it was cold today either… in fact, here in St. John’s, the high went up to 18°C – about 64°F – today!)

Okay, so it’s about 22:00 hrs. (10 pm) on November 1st, the first day of NaNoWriMo 2014. And I’m proud to announce that I currently have a word count of 3,730 words, which is almost 400 more than tomorrow’s daily word count goal. 🙂

Things are going well with the story so far, and I’ve been writing away whenever I’ve had the opportunity. Yay me!

So, we are now at T -6 hours and counting (as mentioned in the title). The Bunnies are hopping excitedly, the cat (Imber) is purring and not wanting to share my lap – or my hands – with a keyboard, and everything’s all ready for NaNoWriMo 2014 to start.

Oh, and it’s Halloween. Happy Spooky Day to all those with little goblins, ghosties, or ghoulies of their own! (Including my sister and brother….)

So I’m at my parents’ house for the weekend (as usual) and raring to go. And while waiting for midnight to hit (at which point I’ll probably be chatting to Vathara), I’m reviewing the fic that I won’t be touching during the month, and distributing candy to those few goblins, ghosties, and ghoulies who come to our door. (We don’t tend to get many trick-or-treaters here.) And petting the dog, and keeping my cat happy and contented and purring.

Expect my next post tomorrow evening, with a word count and status report of the first day of writing!

So, as it says, we’re at T -27 hours and counting for NaNoWriMo 2014, here in Newfoundland and parts of Labrador. And the Plot Bunnies are going, “Dragons! Dragons! Dragons! Hip hip hooray!” (Or something to that effect. It’s distracting.)

I kind of asked them yesterday if they wouldn’t rather do the original fic, now that I’ve got ideas for how it should work out, of Here Be Dragons. The response? “No, we wants Sekirei!” Very firmly. So, looks like I’m still on track for doing the Sekirei fanfic then modifying it later. (Yes, that’s what December is for. Christmas? What is this “Christmas” you speak of?)

Anyway, once things get started, feel free to pop over and take a look at my widget tracking page at tag’s Library, where I’ve got it all set up to provide you with my stats throughout the month. 🙂 (First time it’s been used since 2011, as it happens.) Not to mention my NaNoWriMo Participant‘s page, where you can check out my progress as well, and take a look at my writing buddies! Good friends, all of them. If you pop by, please cheer them on as well!

I do intend to provide regular updates throughout the month – in fact, I’ve made a note to update weekly in my Todoist list, so that I’ll get it done! 🙂

It has been decided that I am definitely writing Here Be Dragons, as per my last post. And I’ve already (with the help of the estimable Vathara) worked out the vast majority of the differences between the fanfic and the SF story. (Except for character names. That I haven’t done yet.) I’ve even set up a project in Scrivener, and got a whole bunch of notes written, doing my usual method of combining “planning” and “pantsing”. Namely, a lot of background info, vague ideas for how I want to start the story, and what I want to have happen.

Unfortunately, the Bunnies are straining eagerly at the reins, wanting to get started before Nov. 1st. It’s getting hard to hold them back (thus all the working out of things, and setting up of the project, and prepping), but I am determined. They are not allowed to start writing until 00:01 hrs. on November 1st!

Of course, then I’ll end up staying up half the night (or all of the morning) getting the first several scenes written out….

Anyway. Just had to grouse about those darn Bunnies. (And if you see me running around cyberspace with a dog catcher’s kit and traps containing nets and PlotBunnyFood(tm), you’ll know what I’m trying to do!)

A Sekirei AU fantasy story (that will be adapted to an SF Original Fic story once done).

For millennia, there have been warnings about the high mountains to the north of Yamato. “Don’t go there; there be dragons.” And “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”. They form an impassable barrier; in order to conduct trade and diplomatic relations with the nations to the north, ships have to be launched from the cities to the south. Yet it’s known that there are mineral riches in those mountains, and from the sea on the other side, it’s clear that their northern slopes are rich and fertile.

Sahashi Minato is a student in the capital of Heian. After having failed the entrance exams to the university for a second time, his friends decide to take him on a “better you than me” trip, and get him a bit of breathing space from his mother. His best friend, Yasaka Ichiro, comes up with a plan: they’ll go explore the mountains!

None of Minato’s protests can dissuade him, and before long, the group is heading off on the camping trip. But they have no idea what awaits them.

Nor do they realize that there are other Yamatoans who have gotten there first. Minaka Hiroto and Sahashi Takami, Minato’s parents, were the first in millennia to discover the truth of the dragon legends. Now Minaka’s company MBI is mining the mountains, and there are many flocks of dragons who are not happy about this. They want it stopped.

I had this all planned back in August. Since the Bunnies were overwhelmed by Sekirei, and I didn’t end up writing even 2K words of Selkie Maiden for Camp NaNoWriMo in July, I’d just have to write it in November. Great plan, everyone’s happy, right?

Just one problem. The Bunnies decided they were having none of it. I’ve been informed that Selkie Maiden is A) too much of a romance for the Bunnies to deal with right now (don’t ask me why, I haven’t a clue, especially when Sekirei plays with romance); and B) they don’t want to let go of Sekirei yet.

“But,” says the poor author, “November NaNoWriMo is reserved for original fics!”

Bunnies do hand-wave. “We’ll make it an alternate universe and just file the serial numbers off.”

Okay, valid way of doing things, I guess. So… it appears that I will likely be writing a Sekirei fic for November, probably the one in my notes currently titled Here Be Dragons. (It is SF, however…. Well, the OrigFic idea is SF. The fanfic that it seems I’ll be writing in November is fantasy….)

Anyway, that’s where things currently stand with NaNoWriMo 2014. Hope to have more for you soon!

Well, it’s been a while. Haven’t meant to be absent from this blog for so long (again), but between the heat that has been hitting St. John’s (see all my previous complaints and rants about my allergy to heat) and getting caught up in the subject of this post, I’ve been more than a little bit distracted.

First of all, don’t know if I mentioned it or not, but I didn’t win April’s Camp NaNoWriMo. *shrugs* Again, various things happened, and Real Life interfered. Didn’t help that we were dealing with my housemates leaving, and two new housemates coming in (whom I admit I get along better with!). But, I did get some writing on It Came From the Library done, and I was determined to do better with this month’s Camp.

The story I chose to work on for this month was an original fic (naturally) called alternatively Seal Song or Selkie Maiden, based on the song “The Maiden and the Selkie” by Heather Dale. I’d already written the prologue, but figured it was easy enough to just remove that from the word count; and I knew how I wanted the first chapter to start out.

Well, I got off to a slow start – didn’t even start writing until July 7th, and ended up not writing anything July 9th and 10th due to horrendous headache attacking me out of nowhere the evening of July 8th.

Meanwhile, Vathara has been working on a Sekirei fanfic, and she was tossing lots of bio stuff and ideas with me, and while I was sick with the headache, she suggested that I read the manga. Heh. I’d already been intrigued by her descriptions of the character Kagari/Homura, especially the gender issues he experiences over the course of the series, and the manga just increased my fascination with him. So, the night of Friday July 11th, what should I end up doing but starting a Sekirei fic?

As the title of this post implies, that fic – titled “Fire and Flight” – rapidly began eating my brain. By (Thursday) July 17th, I’d already managed to write over 25,000 words, and brought my word count goal for the Camp back up to 50K words. And this past Wednesday (the 23rd) I reached 50,455 words just before midnight.

Heh. Things have been semi crazy/busy here lately (as in the last few months), and most of my posting energy has been devoted to the tagAught blog. Plus, I haven’t really had that much energy to write.

But you’re not here to read my ramblings – that’s another post. Nope, today is about Camp NaNoWriMo!

I was working on Camp NaNoWriMo in April of last year, doing a story called It Came From the Library.

When a sophomore mage decides to resurrect a sabretoothed cat through a summoning spell to get a better grade for his current term’s Paleo-biology course, things go wrong.

And then they go spectacularly wrong.

It’s left up to the mage responsible for the mess, and the cousin of his best friend, as well as a Homicide detective investigating the suspicious deaths of too many people, to fix things – before the city becomes overrun with creatures from the Paleocene to the Middle Pleistocene epochs.

— It Came From the Library synopsis, April 2013, from the Camp NaNoWriMo site

The summary has changed slightly – the sophomore mage in question is not a protagonist, and may even be killed early on in the novel – but other than that, there we go!

Anyway, I got about 17K words into in last year. And given that my actual protagonist (“the cousin of his best friend”) is autistic (though not diagnosed as such), April seems to be the appropriate month to work on it, given that everything is about Autism Awareness (which a lot of us feel should be “Autism Acceptance”) this month. So that’s what I’m going to be doing.

My current goal on Camp NaNo is 50K words, but I might decrease that as the month goes on, simply because I started rather late, and I do have other things I’ve got to work on this month. But I figured that I might as well devote some of my spare time to working on adding to ICFtL. 🙂

The link to my page on Camp NaNoWriMo (under TrudyG) is on the links page (big surprise, that! ;)).

Yes, it’s the last day. (Having been suffering a nasty headache from Sunday night onwards that effectively kept me on bed rest Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday kind of ruined the “finish the 50K by the 25th” plan.)

But I did it. For the first time in three years, I have a purple word count slider! Check it out!

No, I didn’t get 100K (and I’m not about to, in the remaining 8-1/2 hours of November), but I won for the first time since I moved to NL. I’m fairly satisfied with that, to be honest.

And Week 3 of NaNoWriMo has provided my turnaround! While the weekend turned out to not be that good for writing, Monday I got about 6.1K words written, Tuesday (partly at the Second Cup on Stavenger Dr.) I got 6.2K written, and Wednesday I got over 4.4K written. Yesterday I got very little written (480 words), but I was distracted with some other stuff, and also somewhat tired. Today, so far, I have written 3.6K, and my current total word count is 36,828 words. Today’s NaNoWriMo word count total goal is 36,667 words. In other words, I’m ba-ack! 😉

2.9K of the words today were written at the Starbucks at Chapters on Kenmount (just past the Avalon Mall). While I don’t have a whole lot of fondness for Starbucks (versus Second Cup, Timothy’s World News Cafe – which seems to be unique to Toronto, or at least Ontario, of the places I’ve visited – and certain Tim Horton’s – there are some not-so-good ones here in St. John’s, including the one at Ropewalk Lane, which has no outlets, which prevented me from really joining in the mid-month NL get-together last Wednesday, since my computer needs to be plugged in!), that particular Starbucks is familiar, since it’s where the Scrabble group gathers on Wednesday mornings, and it’s a fairly good place for getting writing done.

Anyway, my next NaNo goal (aside from maintaining and/or surpassing my current average daily word count, of course) is to try, over the next 9-1/12 days, to reach close to 100K words (aka approx. 50K on each novel I’m working on). Doubt I’ll get there, but it’s always worth a try! 🙂

And the other NaNo goal I’m working towards is to get a verified win on the first day available for checking, Monday – aka have 50K words written by Monday at midnight. Let’s hear it for crazy writing goals! 😉

Either way, it looks pretty definite at this point that I will win this year, and I’m feeling rather good about that. It’s been a long two years with no wins, and I want to have my bar in purple again this year! 😉

‘Later, all!

😉 tag0

[Edit 23:58 hrs.]Okay, total today was 5.2K words, and total word count was 38,429 words! Yay![/Edit]

So, we’re at the halfway mark of NaNoWriMo, and I… haven’t been doing as well as I hoped this year. (Still by far better than last year, of course, but not as well as I hoped.) The goal was to be at 25K words by midnight today (well, my goal was to be at 50K, but… meh), and I’m at… just over 14.6 as of 23:00 hrs.

This is, however, more than 1/4 of the ultimate word count goal, so I’m still counting it as a bit of a win that I can work with.

The problem is, I apparently hit the Week Two Doldrums a bit early. I think I’m getting out of them, but issues I’ve been having with the weather, lack of exercise (which ended Wednesday), and other stuff – including my re-discovery of Heather Dale, a wonderful Toronto musician who does Celtic ballad-style and SCA music – and a few other distractions, kind of dragged me down for a while there. (But, hey, on the plus side? I’ve now got some wonderful new music to add to my “Songs to Write By” playlists… and more stuff for my Christmas wish list! I may have downloaded HDale’s songs off YouTube, but I want to buy them legitimately. And check out Heather’s website – there’s even a free album download available! – and you can buy physical CDs or MP3s from there.)

So, back to my writing. Will be doing some word sprints this weekend and into next week, I suspect. But all is good.

Well, it’s now the first of November. Meaning we are into NaNoWriMo! Yay!

Turns out, I’m not just doing The Trickster’s Trade (though don’t worry, Dad, Mayumi and Darrel are still the priority); I’m also doing a second novel that I’ve been meaning to get more written of for several years now, currently called The Pack. So my personal goal for this November will be to get 100K words – 50K for each of them. (Winning NaNo will be good. Getting to my personal goal – which I’ve accomplished 2 out of the 3 years I’ve won, in terms of word count, will be even better. Actually finishing both books will be a delight! ;))

As mentioned above, TTT has priority, meaning I’ll work on that first each day. (Today, I’ve written 1,904 words on it so far – more than the daily goal – yay me!) Once I’ve got at least the daily goal met, I’ll also work on The Pack, which has been stalled on v7.0, beginning of Chp. 3, for several years now (even longer than TTT, which I got some writing done on a couple of years ago). Both are stories that I really want to tell, and really want to get finished, so NaNo is, of course, the perfect time to work on them.

(No fanfiction words will be counted for NaNo, even if I also write some fanfic – Sanzo presented me with the summary and an image from “Summer’s Pleasure”, the second in my Saiyuki Seasons series [Pt. 1, “Winter’s Treasure”, has 4-1/2 of 7 parts written thus far] last night just before I fell asleep. How do you throttle a character in your head?)

Anyway, that’s the report from the start of NaNoWriMo 2013. Enjoy, all!

[Edit: 23:56 hrs.] Got 364 words written on TP, so that’s a total of 2268 for me today. Yay me! 1.36 times the daily goal! [/End Edit]